


More Weight

by sierra_roe



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Bar Hopping, Gen, Historical Metaphors, Historical References, Karaoke, Massachusetts, New England, Post-Finale, Pre-Newell Road, Road Trips, dramatically moody gilfoyle, he has emotions he just isn't good at dealing with them okay, late summer / early fall is a vibe, the difficulty of making big decisions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25923292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sierra_roe/pseuds/sierra_roe
Summary: “You ever think about leaving tech to be a sheep farmer or something?” Gilfoyle asked.“I left Pakistan for a reason. But you go ahead and herd sheep with your programming skills,” Dinesh paused, “You know, I’ve never gotten this white person obsession with becoming farmers. Do you have any idea how greasy sheep are? They are disgusting creatures.”“You’re greasy and disgusting and I still hang out with you.”---Post-finale, Dinesh and Gilfoyle take a trip to the East Coast and make some hard decisions.
Relationships: Dinesh Chugtai/Bertram Gilfoyle
Comments: 10
Kudos: 42





	More Weight

Laying on a bathroom floor crying wasn’t how Gilfoyle had planned on spending his trip to the East Coast.

He could hear Dinesh outside, shuffling around, then stopping. Something about the particular type of silence outside the door indicated that he was hesitating, probably holding his breath, and then, just as expected, Gilfoyle heard a knock on the door.

“Gilfoyle? Are you okay? Can I get you a glass of water? Or a beer?”

Gilfoyle tried to pull himself together. Standing up, he looked in the mirror. He looked like shit. Whatever, it wasn’t like he was trying to impress anyone. He opened the door and pushed past Dinesh to walk into the living room of the AirBnB, where he flopped face down onto the couch. Dinesh trailed after him, and gingerly sat down in an armchair.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” Gilfoyle said into the couch cushions.

“Do you want to drink about it?”

“Maybe.”

This wasn’t how this trip was supposed to have gone at all. Gilfoyle was supposed to be at Tara’s place right now, having sex until the both of them were too sore and tired to continue. Instead, he had gotten dumped. Had he seen it coming? Well, he hadn’t NOT seen it coming. When he thought back, the signs were probably there, the constant fights that they’d had over the past few months, the strain of their long distance relationship, originally sparked by his absence and unavailability caused by constantly putting out Pied Piper shaped fires, but then somehow spilling over into the months that had followed the company’s collapse.

The couch smelled weird. Fleetingly, Gilfoyle wondered how many guests had fucked on it, then pushed the thought from his mind. Thinking about sex wouldn’t help anything now. Why did he feel so emotional about this, a breakup that he had seen coming? It made no sense.

“I found a pub nearby if you want to get some food along with your beer.” Dinesh said, looking up from his phone.

With a supreme effort of will, Gilfoyle heaved himself off the couch and went to find his jacket.

They walked down the creaky stairs of the building — _why was everything in Boston so old, yet just as expensive as San Francisco?_ — and out onto the street. The cool night air helped to clear his head a little. He should have been embarrassed to have Dinesh see him like this, but after everything, he didn’t really care that much anymore. It wasn’t that strange, really, plus he trusted Dinesh to handle the situation better than anyone else he knew, like Jared, who would have tried to smother him with empathy, or Richard, who would have freaked out, stammered something and left. Not that there was much chance for any of them to be in the same room at once anymore. After Pied Piper had gone under a few months ago, they’d all gone their separate ways. Dinesh and Gilfoyle just happened to be headed in the same direction.

Gilfoyle cleared his throat, making a deliberate effort to pull himself away from his circling thoughts. “So how did it go today?”

“Good. Very good, actually. I think they’re going to make me an offer soon.”

Dinesh was in the late-stage interview process for a CTO position at a password management software company. He’d flown out to Boston for a final week of interviews, and to do some light apartment hunting on the side. The job would mean a cross-country relocation. Gilfoyle had come along because, well, he and Tara _had_ been talking about moving in together, up until things suddenly went south. What Gilfoyle appreciated about Dinesh was that they hadn’t had to discuss if it was weird that they were both kind of thinking about moving to Boston together. There was a lot that went unsaid between them.

“Good for you. You deserve a win.” Gilfoyle said. He was sincere, too. Gilfoyle’s emotions were raw and it had wiped away his customary protective layer of sarcasm. It wasn’t that unusual for him to drop it around Dinesh from time to time, but he made sure to only let it happen when the two of them were alone together.

Dinesh seemed unsure how to respond at first. Gilfoyle could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes as Dinesh ran an internal calculation, a Gilfoyle-sincerity-detection algorithm. _If (high_stakes == true); if (observers_exist == false)…_ Being occasionally sincere was an advanced form of fucking with Dinesh, because sometimes it made him get overconfident and let his guard down. But in this case, it happened to be the truth.

“Thanks, man.” Dinesh finally said, after his algorithm had apparently rejected the possibility that he was being fucked with, “I appreciate that.”

Boston made Gilfoyle feel claustrophobic. The narrow roads, the honking cars, and constantly having to avoid people on the sidewalk was already starting to get to him after only a few days there.

Their AirBnb was in Harvard Square – technically Cambridge, not Boston. And technically it wasn’t _their_ AirBnb, it was Dinesh’s AirBnb that Gilfoyle was crashing in now, he supposed. He’d made fun of Dinesh mercilessly for booking in Harvard Square and even taking a campus tour of the University ( _“What, you don’t get enough of the douchebags from Stanford that you had to come all the way out here to see more of their kind? Or did you want to get inspired by seeing the place where Zuck started the company that would eventually undermine American democracy?”_ ) but Dinesh deserved it, obviously.

“I think I’m going to get the clam chowder,” Dinesh said, once they were seated and looking at the pub menu. “Boston, right? So classic!”

“That order’s going to make it clear you’re a tourist. And tourist sounds pretty close to terrorist.” It wasn’t his best terrorist joke, but he was off his game.

“Shut the fuck up, Gilfoyle.” Dinesh said without looking up, clearly happy that Gilfoyle was starting to return to his normal abrasive self.

They ate at the bar. The crowd seemed to have a heavy mix of tech bros. They were all the same, no matter what city you were in. A standard uniform of gingham or chambray shirts with brown boots for the fancy boys, or company logo t-shirts with jeans and sneakers for the unfancy boys.

“What do you think Richard and Jared are doing right now?” Dinesh asked. They kept giving themselves “no Pied Piper talk” rules which they each both broke with abandon. Letting go had been hard on all of them in their own ways.

“Probably sucking each other’s dicks under the Eiffel Tower,” Gilfoyle said because he knew it would make Dinesh laugh.

After they ate, Gilfoyle stepped away to visit the washroom, and when he returned, he caught Dinesh furtively paying the bill with a sneaky look on his face.

“What’s going on here.” Gilfoyle sat back down and crossed his arms, leaning back to eye Dinesh.

“So,” Dinesh said, “Don’t be mad, but I found the next bar for us to go to.”

“And why would I be mad about going to another bar? Drinking is literally my only pastime these days.”

“Oh, no reason! I’ve got the directions here so we can just walk over there now!”

“I don’t trust you but seeing as I have nothing else to do tonight, I guess I’ll go along with whatever dipshit scheme you’re planning.”

That made Dinesh look excessively pleased with himself in a way that worried Gilfoyle, but he had resigned himself to grit his teeth and get through whatever Dinesh had in mind. He just hoped it wasn’t some sort of Boston tea party historical reenactment bar or something like that. He hadn’t thought to pack any of his LARPing costumes.

The bar turned out to be a… Chinese restaurant?

“Don’t tell me you’re hungry again already.”

“Nooo, nothing like that. C’mon, it said it was upstairs.”

They walked through the Chinese restaurant and upstairs to the second floor bar. Gilfoyle was growing increasingly suspicious, but they sat down and he let Dinesh order them a giant scorpion bowl, which arrived with the center on fire, and two long straws.

“Oh my god, this tastes just like juice. I could drink this all day.”

“Careful, lightweight. I don’t want to have to carry you home.” Gilfoyle decided that the best way to stop one-drink Dinesh from turning into full-on drunk blabbermouth Dinesh would be to drink most of the scorpion bowl himself.

Music started up and Gilfoyle turned around. “Motherfucker. You brought me to a karaoke night.”

Approximately one scorpion bowl later, Gilfoyle had stopped caring that he’d been tricked into coming to a karaoke bar. Somehow he hadn’t put it together before, but the types of people who liked karaoke were just like Dinesh — they were all perfect targets for ridicule. Gilfoyle discovered that he was happy enough sitting back and trading sharp one-liners with Dinesh about the other bar patrons.

* * *

The next morning, Gilfoyle woke up with a splitting headache and the nagging feeling that he’d done something to embarrass himself. Replaying the last events he could remember, he got a hazy picture of… had Dinesh managed to talk him into doing karaoke together? Had they done a Queen song? Gilfoyle groaned quietly and buried his face in the pull-out couch mattress.

A memory came back to him, the two of them, struggling home after karaoke. Well, mostly Gilfoyle was struggling and Dinesh was holding him up.

_“You ever think about leaving tech to just like be a sheep farmer or something,” Gilfoyle slurred._

_“I left Pakistan for a reason. But you go ahead and herd sheep with your programming skills,” Dinesh paused, “You know, I’ve never gotten this white person obsession with becoming farmers. You know it’s not a glamorous or easy job? We had animals growing up but the servants took care of them, and it was clearly not a pleasant task. Do you have any idea how greasy sheep are? They are disgusting creatures.”_

_“You’re greasy and disgusting and I still hang out with you.”_

Gilfoyle winced. He had a feeling Dinesh wouldn’t let him forget about this one. He could hear him banging around in the kitchen making coffee. Gilfoyle didn’t _really_ want to talk, especially not about his drunken plans for his new career in sheep farming, but he also wanted coffee, so he dragged himself onto his feet and limped into the kitchen.

“Are you ready to go? We need to pick up the car soon.”

“The fuck are you talking about.”

“Salem! Remember? We talked about it last night.”

Gilfoyle did not remember.

“Oh my god. I rented a car because we decided to take a trip to Salem today. To cheer your stupid satanist ass up.”

* * *

A car behind them honked as soon as the light turned green and Dinesh casually flipped them the bird before stepping on the gas. “Remember when we first met and you pretended you were from Boston?”

“Technically I said I had moved to California from Boston, which was true, since I lived here with Tara for a bit. You know I couldn’t let anyone know I was in the country illegally.”

“Yeah, but it would make so much more sense if you were from Boston! The people here are dicks, just like you. You’re not nice like a Canadian, you’re an asshole like a … Boston-er!”

“Bostonian. And they self-identify as Massholes.”

“You’re kinda proving my point here, man.”

“You’re right though. People are dicks everywhere, but they’re dicks here especially.” Gilfoyle paused, “Why? Are you reconsidering moving here?”

Dinesh shifted in his seat, “No, I don’t know, it’s just…” he trails off, uncomfortable, “It’s just, with you and Tara split up, I mean…”

Gilfoyle shrugged and looked out the window at the traffic. He had always hated direct conversations about big stuff like this. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a quality that had meshed well with having a polyamorous relationship. “It’s Boston. There’s plenty of tech jobs here. Maybe I’ll work at Boston Dynamics or something.”

“God, can you imagine if Son of Anton somehow got inside one of those things?”

“Fuck. Maybe I won’t work there.”

“I already had to save your ass once from ending the world with your AI, I’m not planning on doing it again, not against a weaponized robot dog.”

They spent a moment contemplating the end of humanity in the face of a robot uprising, then Dinesh glanced over at him cautiously a couple times, and back to the road. Gilfoyle could see it in his peripheral vision and stubbornly continued staring straight ahead, refusing to make eye contact. After a few minutes of this, it occurred to him that as much as having direct conversations irritated him, Dinesh’s significantly more pronounced incompetence at it irritated him even more.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Gilfoyle said, finally looking over at him, “I can tell what you’re getting at and you’re too chickenshit to say. You want to ask me if it still makes any sense for me to move here without a job, and only because you are. That’s if you get the job, of course.”

Dinesh somehow managed to look simultaneously more relieved and more tense. “Uh, yeah. That.”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe. It might, it might not.”

Dinesh didn’t look very comforted by this answer.

“Why? Would it change anything for you?” Gilfoyle asked.

Dinesh narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know. I mean, no, it can’t change anything for me. An opportunity like this one isn’t going to turn up again anytime soon.”

“Right. So it shouldn’t change anything for you.”

“Right.”

They drove in silence for a bit. Dinesh gnawed at a hangnail. Because the two of them could never agree on music, they just didn’t bother to try anymore. When Gilfoyle spotted a drive-thru Dunkins, he made Dinesh stop so he could get an iced coffee that he spiked with whiskey from a flask he discovered cleverly stashed in his jacket. The alcohol and caffeine two-punch combined to dissolve most of the lingering remnants of his hangover tension. It felt like finally shrugging off a tight and itchy sweater that he’d been wearing all morning.

“I’m gonna be so pissed if you get me arrested for whatever open container laws they have in this state,” Dinesh said, but there wan’t any heat behind it.

* * *

Salem was pretty enough once they finally arrived, other than the fact that it was a massive tourist trap for spooky teenagers and adults who used to be spooky teenagers. The town had really doubled down on the historical witchcraft angle, and the streets were full of shops selling everything from crystals and dowsing rods to postcards and keychains. Gilfoyle hated it immediately. Predictably, Dinesh wanted to go into every souvenir shop they passed.

“Do _not_ buy that for me,” Gilfoyle said when he caught him looking at a _Live, Laugh, Praise Satan_ coffee mug, “The last time you bought me a Praise Satan mug you got one with the pentagrams upside down.”

“So? You still used it every day.”

“I’m leaving.” Gilfoyle strode out of the store.

Dinesh followed him out, although not without casting a final longing glance at the rack of novelty mugs.

The air outside the shop was hot, heat streaming up from the pavement in waves. It was the tail end of summer, that period of time where it’s technically fall but doesn’t feel like it yet, and summer is still clinging with a sticky humidity that refuses to burn off.

“It’s not just if you’d move to Boston or not. It’s that we wouldn’t be working together even if you did.” Dinesh said abruptly.

“Is it.”

“I mean, I could probably try and get you hired…”

“I don’t know if I could work at a big company again.”

“Yeah, I know. Plus my ass would be on the line with whatever HR fights you ended up getting into.” Dinesh said.

“Pied Piper was at its best when it was small, wasn’t it.” Gilfoyle asked.

“Yeah, I feel like it kind of went downhill around the time when we hired the Stallions.”

“Is the money worth going through that again?”

“Yeeeeesss?” Dinesh said, his eyebrows practically crawling off his face. It was the least convincing _yes_ Gilfoyle had ever heard.

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘if it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a no’?” Gilfoyle asked, “It’s how I make most of my important decisions.”

“Why is it hard for me to imagine you being a fuck yes about anything?”

Gilfoyle shot him a flat stare, “I’m a very expressive person and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Stop ruining the point I’m making. You have to trust your gut instinct. If you’re not excited about this job, it’s probably a good sign you shouldn’t take it.”

“Look, I get your point, Gilfoyle, I’m just saying that in the real world, it’s not that simple. Sometimes you have to say yes to things that you aren’t a fuck yes about if you want to keep paying the bills.”

They continued walking through the town, both pushing up against the tense silence that had grown between them.

“They came through with the offer this morning.”

“The fuck? Why didn’t you say?”

Dinesh just shrugged uncomfortably, “Because you were asleep. Because I didn’t want to have this conversation right away. Because of everything. Because it makes it real, and not just hypothetical.”

“How much was it for?”

“Three hundred grand plus stock options and a relocation package.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. It’s a good offer. I’m a fuck yes about that money.”

“…but?”

Dinesh shook his head and didn’t respond.

The two wandered aimlessly for a bit until they found themselves at a historic cemetery near the site of the witchcraft trials. The gravestones here were very old, weathered by hundred of years of nor’easters battering them, but still legible. Some of them had skulls carved on them. Gilfoyle admired the aesthetic choices that people used to make back in the 1690s. No beating around the bush here with carvings of flowers or something, no, stick a skull on the grave instead, make sure people know what that gravestone really means.

They stopped at a plaque memorializing Giles Corey, a man killed during the Salem witchcraft trials.

“You know about this story?” Gilfoyle asked.

Dinesh shook his head.

“This guy was on trial for witchcraft. He refused to admit to it, so to force a confession, they did this thing called pressing, where they put boards on top of him and stacked a bunch of heavy rocks on top. They kept adding more rocks over the course of three days, but he still wouldn’t confess. You know what his last words were before he died? _More weight_.”

“That’s noble. He died refusing to give a false confession.”

“No, it’s not fucking noble! He was a victim of a period of mass hysteria and a fucked up judicial system, he’s not some kind of fucking martyr.”

“Okay, cynic.” Dinesh rolled his eyes.

“Look Dinesh,” Gilfoyle said, “I didn’t want to say this because didn’t want to make it harder for you to make this decision, but you know you don’t have to take this job, right?”

Dinesh didn’t say anything.

“You do what’s right for you, but for me, I can’t work in a huge company again. I’m done with building platforms, done with executing on someone else’s vision. I’m done with fucking scrum boards. I’m hitting the hard opt out button on that life.”

“So what will you do instead? Become a sheep farmer like all that bullshit you were talking last night?”

“No Dinesh, I won’t actually become a sheep farmer. But I have been thinking… you know what we did a lot of at Pied Piper? Security stuff.”

“That is true.”

“So security consulting is my path out. No software product, no sales team, no boss. Just clients that I pick. That _we_ pick, if you want to join me.”

Dinesh looked conflicted, “Yeah, I don’t know… it’s not that I don’t want to work with you, it’s just that I’d be leaving a lot of money on the table. And a lot of stock options.”

He he trailed off, gazing off into the mid distance. Gilfoyle let the silence hang in the air.

“I’m sick of this stupid depressing graveyard,” Dinesh said abruptly, “Let’s go look at the tall ships.”

The tall ships were, as their name described, very tall, and very old fashioned. They were docked in the nearby harbor, sails furled, creaking and swaying slightly, a testament to Boston’s maritime history.

It was cooler on the wharf, away from the heat that had risen up from the asphalt and cobblestones when they were in the town. A breeze blew in off the water, carrying with it the smell of brine and dead sea creatures and blowing Gilfoyle’s hair into his face. He regretted not thinking to bring a hair tie.

“The worst thing about Pied Piper was,” Dinesh began. It was a game they played some times, taking turns rattling off things they had hated about their former life. It felt cathartic to get it all out. Not that they hadn’t complained at the time, but now that they had space from it, it felt different.

“That time everyone slept in the office during the code sprint,” finished Gilfoyle.

“That time Jared turned Holden into a psychopath,” Dinesh said.

“That time I almost got thrown in jail,” Gilfoyle said.

“All those times Richard betrayed someone’s trust,” Dinesh said said.

“All those hours in the early days we never got paid for.” Gilfoyle said.

“Fuck,” said Dinesh, turning away from the ships to look at Gilfoyle, “Why did we do that to ourselves? Pied Piper was really a more weight situation, wasn’t it?”

“Only about every goddamn day.”

Dinesh looked out over the water, considering it, “Fuck more weight,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

“ _Fuck_ more weight,” Gilfoyle agreed.

Dinesh turned to face him, “You know what, you’re right. I’m fucking sick of it too. I can’t go back to that life.”

“So you’re saying you’re in?”

“I mean, I guess I already popped my _turning down loads of money_ cherry,” Dinesh said, mouth quirking up into a smile, “Fuck it, I’m in.”

**Author's Note:**

> Not gonna lie, part of what motivated this fic was feeling nostalgic for bar hopping in Boston. If we ever go back to a world where karaoke bars exist, I recommend the Hong Kong in Harvard Square. 
> 
> For the Gilfoyle-sincerity-detection algorithm, I had to google what conditional statements in Java look like, although I am fully aware that this level of detail matters only to me and no one else reading this. 
> 
> The pentagrams on Gilfoyle’s 'Drink Coffee, Praise Satan' mug are actually rotated in a way that makes them pentacles (Wicca symbol) rather than pentagrams (Satanism symbol). Because I can't imagine Gilfoyle would have bought it for himself, I can only assume that it was a present from Dinesh.
> 
> I’m not gonna pretend that my personal feelings about working in tech don’t have something to do with the particular metaphor I chose for the end.


End file.
